Much has been hidden from the new president by the Bush team

Bamford ends his new book by bringing back one of my Bill of Rights heroes, the late Senator Frank Church of Idaho, whose Senate investigating committee, during the 1970s, first uncovered the frightening range and depth of NSA's spying on us. "That capability," said Church, "at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such [is the NSA's] capability to monitor everything. . . . There would be no place to hide. . . . If this government ever became a tyranny . . . the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because resistance . . . is within the reach of the government to know."

After quoting that warning from Frank Church, Bamford ends: "There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America. Only law ensures that we never fall into that abyss—the abyss from which there is no return." Are you listening, President Obama?